Microsoft Research, a department in Microsoft that does the obvious has today revealed a new proof-of-concept for the Xbox, IllumiRoom. The system is designed to push the boundaries of your living room by using space outside of the screen to help project visualisations, supposedly to enhance your entertainment experience.

IllumiRoom uses a Kinect for Windows camera and a projector to blur the lines between on-screen content and the environment we live in allowing us to combine our virtual and physical worlds. For example, our system can change the appearance of the room, induce apparent motion, extend the field of view, and enable entirely new game experiences.

Our system uses the appearance and the geometry of the room (captured by Kinect) to adapt the projected visuals in real-time without any need to custom pre-process the graphics. What you see in the videos below has been captured live and is not the result of any special effects added in post production.

The project was designed by Brett Jones, Hrvoje Benko, Eyal Ofek and Andy Wilson, however is not yet fully functional for consumer usage. The team has stated on the Research website that they plan to have more information and a paper explaining all the details at this years ACM CHI 2013, a conference on human-computer interaction in Paris. You can check out the video below for a brief look at the new technology, or head over to the official website for more.

Another boffin project that will end up gathering dust like Kinect. The problem is that the effort for the developers to rejig their games to support is too much, so you get 2 games that actually support it, people don't buy it, and it dies a slow death.Unless it's standard hardware included as part the console, all these 'extras' have a limited shelf life.

The bits where its just projecting the game outside the screen looks a bit s***, but the stars, and the effects where it actually messes with the furniture to make it look like its moving are pretty cool

Hahaha, I do not believe my eyes, SIGCHI linked by Ausgamers. Mind blown.

Anyway, looks cool - one thing to note is the video was probably done by the project team, not by a PR division, so what it looks like is most likely a lot more accurate than the usual post-processed commercial shots. I guess the real question is what difference does it make to engagement/immersion - which I am sure will be in the CHI paper.

cool idea, but they will need to improve it a lot before taking it to market. i think this is one of those in between projects, you know where they develop something and what they learn from it becomes the basis for something much more awesome..